Eight Cores At 5GHz: Intel Core i9-9900KS Review

While this article has no lack of synthetic benchmarks, SiSoftware’s Sandra makes it very easy to get reliable performance information on key metrics, such as arithmetic, multimedia, cryptography, and memory. Sandra is designed in such a way that it takes the best advantage of any architecture it’s given, so each CPU always has its best chance to shine.

That means a couple of things. This is definitely the “best” possible performance outlook for any chip, and doesn’t necessary correlate with real-world performance in other tests. It’s best used as a gauge of what’s possible, and to see where one architecture obviously differs from another.

Multimedia

It used to be that AMD had a bit of a rough go trying to keep up to Intel in Sandra’s multimedia test, but the times have sure changed – especially if we compare the overall value of each chip being tested. For $500, the 3900X outperforms the 9900KS here, but that hardly means the 9900KS has failed at its job – since it’s not like the 3900X can boast about 5GHz clocks (remember when the circa-2013 FX-9590 did?) Where that matters depends on the workload (and speaking of, gaming is coming up – promise!)

Arithmetic

From a price perspective, AMD is once again hard to defeat here, not just when compared to the 9900KS, but some others, too. The only Intel chip that the 3900X falls short of is the 9980XE. This is when it really pays to know your workload. In this test, the 8 cores of the 9900KS come close to matching the 10 cores of the aging 7900X Core X-series chip.

Cryptography

This cryptography test can be looked at from a very different ways. With the basic test, both the 9900K and 9900KS place closer to the bottom than in most tests, thanks to its heavily multi-core nature. With the higher-security test, Intel has an edge, and manages to creep back up the chart. The Core X-series, with its AVX-512 capabilities, comes out on top. That even includes the older 10-core model.

Memory Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth can often scale oddly, and there are definitely no exceptions here. How the 2920X performs so well overall, we’re not sure, but this has been a consistent result. Overall though, it’s easy to sum this one up: if you need huge bandwidth, you need a 4-channel platform, aka: Core X-series.